A Touch of Infinity (15 page)

“You don't believe me?” Harvey said unhappily.

“Let's say, we want to believe you, Harvey.”

“That's why we want you to show us, Harvey,” said Serpio, “so we can believe you and wind this up.”

“Just one moment,” the Medical Examiner put in. “Did you ever study biology, Harvey? Physiology? Anatomy?”

Harvey shook his head.

“How come?”

“We kept moving around. I just missed out.”

“I see. Come on, now, Harvey, let's have that Danish.”

Harvey reached out, two feet in front of his nose, and plucked at the air and emerged with air. His face revealed his confusion and disappointment. He plucked a second time and a third time, and each time his fingers were empty.

“Harvey, try water rolls,” Suzie begged him.

He tried water rolls with equal frustration.

“Harvey, concentrate,” Suzie pleaded.

He concentrated, and still his fingers were empty.

“Please, Harvey,” Suzie begged him, and then when she realized it was all to no end, she turned on the policemen and informed them that it was their fault, and threatened to get a lawyer and to sue them and to do all the other things that people threaten to do when they are in a situation such as Suzie was in.

“Serpio, why don't you have a policeman drive the Kepplemens home?” the Chief of Detectives suggested; and when Serpio and Harvey and Suzie had gone, he turned to the Medical Examiner and said that one thing about being a cop was that if you only kept your health, you would see everything.

“Now I have seen everything,” he said, “and tell me, Doc, did you lift any fingerprints off that big tomato downstairs?”

“She hasn't any.”

“Oh?”

“That's the way it crumbles,” said the Medical Examiner. “Every American boy's dream—seven feet high and a size forty-six bust. How do I write a death certificate for something that was never alive?”

“That's your problem. I keep feeling I should have held those two.”

“For what?”

“That's just it. Are you religious, Doc?”

“I sometimes wish I was.”

“What I mean is, I keep thinking this is some kind of miracle.”

“Everything is, birth, death, getting looped.”

“Yeah. Well, make it a Jane Doe DC, and put her in the icebox before the press gets a look. That's all we need.”

“Yeah, that's all we need,” the Medical Examiner agreed.

Meanwhile, back in the four-room apartment, Suzie was weeping and Harvey was attempting to comfort her by explaining that no matter how much he tried, he would have never gotten the ten-dollar-bill problem completely licked.

“Who cares about the damn bills?”

“What then, kitten?”

“Kitten! All these years, and what do you want but an enormous slobbering seven-foot blonde with a forty-six bust.”

“It's just that I never got anything that I really wanted,” Harvey tried to explain.

“Not even me?”

“Except you, kitten.”

Then they went to bed, and everything was about as good as it could be.

9

The Mind of God

“How do you feel?” Greenberg asked me.

“Fine. Lousy. Frightened. A little sick, a little stupid, empty in the stomach. Nauseous. I think I could throw up at will. But mostly afraid. Otherwise I'm fine.”

“Good.”

“Why is it good?”

“Because you're facing yourself fully and acknowledging your sensations. That's very important at this moment. If you told me you were filled with noble resolve and without fear, I would be worried.”

“I'm worried,” I told him. “Damn worried.”

“There's no contract, no commitment that's binding,” Zvi Leban said slowly, his cold blue eyes fixed on me. I never saw him as the Nobel Prize winner, the brilliant physicist so often compared to Einstein and Fermi; to me he was an Israeli, the kind I respect but do not particularly like, cold as ice and full of an implacable will that appears to partake of neither courage nor cowardice, only resolution. “The door's open.”

“Zvi—stop that,” Dr. Goldman said quietly.

“It's all right,” said Greenberg. Greenberg was many things, M.D., psychiatrist, physicist, philosopher, businessman—all of it crowded into a fat, easygoing, moonfaced man of sixty-one years who never raised his voice and never lost his temper. “It's quite all right. He has to face everything now, his fears, his hopes, his resolutions, and also the open door. The fact that he can walk out and there will be no recriminations. You understand that, don't you, Scott?”

“I understand it.”

“We have no secrets. A project like this would be meaningless and immoral if we had secrets from each other. Perhaps it's immoral in any case, but I am afraid I have lost touch with what men call morality. We had our time of soul-searching, seven years of it, and then we came to our decision. The Sabbath of our soul-searching, I may say, and it's done. Finished. You were and are my friend. I brought you into this in the beginning, and then you placed yourself squarely in the center of it. Zvi was against you, which you also know. He thought it should be a Jew. Goldman and I thought otherwise, and Zvi accepted our decision.”

“I'd like to close the door,” I said. “I would not have come today if I had not made up my mind. I'm going through with it. I told Zvi that I had no hate left. The hate has washed out. I had to be truthful about that. Zvi regards it as a lack of resolution.”

“You never married again,” said Goldman.

“I don't quite know what that means.”

“There's no point to this discussion now,” Zvi said. “Scott is going through with it. He's a brave man, and I would like to shake hands with him.”

He did so with great formality.

“You've thought of some questions?” Goldman asked. “We still have an hour.” He was a thin wisp of a man, his brilliance honed down to knife-edge. He had an inoperable malignancy; in a year he would be dead, yet his impending doom appeared to arouse in him only curiosity and a vague sadness. They were three unusual men indeed.

“Some. Yes, I've thought of some that I haven't asked before. I don't know that I should ask them now.”

“You should,” said Goldman. “You go with enough doubts. If you can clear up a few of them, so much the better.”

“Well, I've been brooding over the mathematics of it, and I still can't make head or tail of them, but I'm afraid an hour's no good for that.”

“No.”

“Still one tries to translate into images. I suppose the mathematicians never do.”

“Some do, some don't,” Zvi said, smiling for the first time. “I have, but it impeded my work. So I gave it up. Just as there are no words for things we do not know, so there are no images for concepts outside of our conceptual experience.”

“Specifically, Scott?” Greenberg asked me.

“It always comes down to breaking the chain. Then the result is entirely different. For example, this project would not take place. We would not be standing here in a stone warehouse in Norwalk, Connecticut. We would not have planned what we planned. The necessity would not face us.”

“Conceivably.”

“Then would I take the chance of destroying you—and thousands, perhaps millions of others now alive?”

“There,” said Zvi, “is where the conceptual and the mathematical part. The answer is no, but there is no way I can explain.”

“Can you explain to yourself?”

Zvi shook his head slowly, and Greenberg said, “No more, Scott, than Einstein could visualize to himself his proposition that space might be curved and limited.”

“But I can visualize,” I protested. “Nothing as complicated as Einstein's proposition, but I can visualize sending me back twenty-four hours. At this time yesterday, the four of us were here, sitting at this same table. I was drinking a scotch and water. What then? Would there have been two of me, identical?”

“No. It would simply be yesterday.”

“And if I had a bottle of wine in my hand instead of a glass of scotch?”

“Then you propose the paradox,” Goldman said gently, “and so our powers of reason cease. Which is why we do not test the machine. My dear Scott—you and I both face death, and that too is a paradox and a mystery. We are physicists, mathematicians, scientists, and we have discovered certain coordinates and from them developed certain equations. Our symbols work, but our minds, our vision, our imagination cannot follow the symbols. I may brood over a death that is inevitable, the maturation of a malignancy within me; you, as a far braver man, accept the likelihood of death in your own undertaking. But neither of us can comprehend what faces us. Do you think of yourself as a good Christian?”

“Not particularly.”

“Perhaps no more than I think of myself as a good Jew—if indeed either term has any meaning. But long ago I heard the legend of Moses, who could not enter the promised land. Then, standing at his side on Mount Nebo, God revealed to him all that had been and all that would be—the past and the future, all of it existent in God's time. That too is in symbols. Do you understand why we cannot take the chance of testing the machine, of sending you back even a single day?”

“Not really.”

“Then you must take our word for it, as you have.”

I shrugged and nodded.

“Any other questions, Scott?” Greenberg asked me.

“A thousand—plus all I have asked before. I have the questions, but you have no answers.”

“I wish we had them,” Goldman said. “I truly do.”

“All right, let's get on with it. First, the money.”

Greenberg laid it in small piles on the table. “Ten thousand dollars, American. We would have liked it to be more, but we think that this will cover every contingency. Not easy to come by, believe me, Scott. We pulled some of the largest strings we have in Washington, and if anyone tells you museum officials cannot be bribed, he is mistaken. Pay for everything in cash without any trepidation. It was the most common method in those days. There are two hundred pounds British. Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“Who knows? We simply do not wish you to have to exchange money, and thus we include these small sums in francs and lire.”

“And in marks?”

“German and Austrian—about five thousand dollars in each. Strangely enough, they were easier to obtain than the dollars. We have our own sources through dealers. Indeed, most of the marks came from one man who had some sense of what we were doing. No hard money; that would only make problems.”

“The revolver?”

“We decided against it. We know it was common practice at the time to carry one, but in this case you are safer with only the knife. Here it is.” He placed a pearl-handled folding knife on the table. “Four blades, common gentleman's possession at the time. You will use the large one. It's honed to a razor edge.”

Zvi watched me carefully, his eyes slitted. I opened the pearl-handled knife and ran my finger along the edge of the blade. I was rather relieved that they had decided against the revolver; after all, it was probably a more civilized world than the one we live in.

Goldman brought a large cardboard box and placed it on the table. “Your clothes,” he explained, smiling almost apologetically. “You can begin to change now. Amazing how much in style they are. You may want to keep them afterwards.”

“Afterwards—”

Greenberg waited, his face thoughtful.

“We are afterwards. That's what keeps tearing my gut.”

“Get it out, Scott,” Greenberg said.

“We are afterwards. That's all.”

“Let go of it. Our minds are not made for a paradox.”

“‘My ways are not thy ways; neither are my thoughts thy thoughts,'” Goldman said.

“Quoting God?”

Goldman grinned, and suddenly I relaxed and began to peel off my clothes.

“Damn you, I envy you,” Zvi said suddenly. “If I did not have this cursed limp and two duodenal ulcers, I would go myself. It's what no man has ever been offered, what no man has ever experienced. You step into the mind of God.”

“For atheists, you Jews are the most frantically religious people I have ever known.”

“That's also part of the paradox,” Greenberg agreed. “The label in the suit is Heffner and Kline. They were excellent custom tailors. Imported Irish tweed, hand spun and hand woven. Your valise contains another suit, dark blue cheviot. Both of them rather heavy for May, but they didn't go in for tropicals in those days. Also six shirts, underclothes, and all the rest.”

He brought the valise from where it stood by the wall, next to the strange maze of tubes and wires it had taken them seven years to build. Goldman fitted the collar to the shirt and handed it to me.

“Ever wear one of these?” he inquired.

“My father wore them.” It was the first time I had thought about my father in years, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with the memory.

“No.” Zvi shook his head.

“Why not?” I asked desperately. “Why not? He wouldn't know me.”

“You would not know him either,” Zvi said evenly. “It will be eighteen ninety-seven. You were not born until nineteen twenty. How old was he then when you were born?”

“Thirty-six.”

“Then in eighteen ninety-seven he would be a boy of thirteen—to what end, Scott?” Greenberg asked.

“I don't know to what end. So help me God, I don't know. But if I could only look at him!”

Goldman walked over to me and helped me adjust the two gold buttons that held the collar to the shirt. “There, now. You will let me tie the cravat, Scott. I know exactly how it should be done. And watch me carefully, so you can do it yourself. And take our word for it. We are interfering with a schematic—a great, enormous schematic—so we must interfere as little as possible. What Zvi said before is quite true—we enter the mind of God. We are bold men, all of us. Also, perhaps, we are madmen—as the people who exploded the first atomic bomb were madmen. They tampered with the mystery, and the world paid a price. We also tamper with the mystery, and we shall also pay a price. But we must tamper as little as possible. You must not be diverted. You must speak to no one unless it is absolutely necessary. You must not touch things, you must not change things—except the single thing to which we are pledged. Now watch how I tie the cravat—very simple, isn't it?”